\

# Objectivity

My view on the objective is unusual, but I think very important if correct. With the scientific revolution came a confusion about the nature of the world that has remained to this day and is pervasive in all aspects of modern life. That confusion is that the "objective" is how things *really* are regardless of what we say or think despite while also using "objective" as a property of descriptions and not the world itself. That is, "objective" is a property of a statement like, "it is raining", and not a property of the weather when it's raining. What this means is that "the objective" is ambiguous between the world and the world as described. What is at stake is the nature of description in relation to the nature of the world. When we confuse the two, our reasoning produces strange conclusions such as the Hard Problem of Consciousness.  

When we think about the world, we represent the world as being some way, but the thought is not what it is about. This presents us with three objects of analysis: the world, the thought about the world, and the physical brain state which realizes the representational thought. Both the world and the in are actual, concrete things, but the thought is something more difficult to explain. It is in one sense a relation between the brain and the world because it is about the world and yet separated from the world as it is realized by the brain. To put this another way, when you think about a tree in front of you, the presence of the thought is partially explainable by the activity of your brain, but not completely. Analyzing just the brain does not and cannot explain what a thought is about. We must also look to the world itself and find correlations between your brain states and how the world is so that we discover that when you think about a tree, you are in some brain state that correlates with the presence of trees. Once that correlation is discovered, we can infer that you are thinking about a tree when we detect that brain state independently of the world. But that inference is possible only after we compare your brain states with the world. This means that there is nothing essential about your brain having to do with trees, and yet, to you it seems clear when you are thinking about trees that you are in fact thinking about trees. What follows from this is that your thought about the tree is not a tree nor in any way like a tree, but is about a tree in virtue of some kind of a relation to trees in the world such that you are capable of being in such a state when a tree is present and after such exposure, capable of entering into that state again to produce thoughts about such a thing. The aboutness of the brain state is established by your connection to the world. Your thought about the tree, just is in no sense the tree itself. And so it goes, I think, for all thought. No matter how accurate we deem these thoughts to be, they are distinct in kind and identity from what they are about.   

When we think about other people we do not become those people. If I am in pain, and you know that I'm in pain, no matter how empathetic you may be, you will not feel my pain. There is a difference between being in some state and observing such a state. Whatever the nature of "being" is, it is clear on logical grounds that representation in all forms is never identical with what is represented. What's worse, is that even the physical form of the representation, say, the written word, or a picture, or whatever, is itself clearn distinct in kind from the object of representation. So on these two counts, the abstract and the physical, representations are distinct from the represented. When we think about the world in whatever objective manner one prefers, no matter how accurate that way of representing the world may be, it will fail to be the world. Philosophers like Kant have made similar observations but seem to miss the deeper point. It is not that the world as it truly is is inaccessible to us, but rather that to know is to represent truly, but to represent at all is to be distinct from what is represented. Far from being a failure of knowledge it is its nature. The world is as it is, and if the standard knowledge is to be identical with what the knowledge is of, then there would be no knowledge. This isn't just a high standard, but a deep confusion. 

With that said, the difficulty for the philosophy of mind is to account for how one could know what it is like to be in pain, or pleasure, or any possible state. It would seem that we represent ourselves as being some way, while actually being that way. This would contradict what I've said so far. The problem as I see it, however, is that while we do represent ourselves and are aware of ourselves in these ways, it does not require our self-knowledge to be identical with those aspects of ourselves represented. In fact, we need to explain how representation and being come apart to account for how we are all so often wrong about ourselves such that we can deny being mad or fail to know that we are hungry, tired, or falling in love. The concept of self seems to refer to the totality of oneself, while the physical realization of a representation need only physically a sliver of that total. The redness of an apple, doesn't represent itself as being red, but if an apple had a cognitive subsystem, that part of itself that knew that it was red, would be a distinct part, both in location and kind. Their being distinct physical states is an essential aspect of representation. The important point here is that no matter how accurate the representation, whatever it is like to be a representation will not be what it is like to be what is represented. To deny this fact is to confuse the abstract with the actual and from that kind of confusion all manner of absurdity will follow. 

The sciences have achieved a level of precision only possible with mathematical representation. But although this type of representation seems so distinct from the nature of thought, it endures the same problem. There is no equation so accurate that it is identical with what it describes just as there is no thought so accurate that it is identical with what it is about. And so the world of objective description is not identical with the actual concrete world which those thoughts and descriptions and equations are about. It is the realm of the non-actual abstract while the actual world in concrete and particular and in no way descriptive or representational in itself.  

My conclusion is that the objective is actually abstract while the actual world is concrete and particular, not abstract at all. It is tempting to use the dichotomy between the objective and subjective here and suggest that the actual is then subject. But I see no reason to throw in with the idealists and maintain a mistaken framing simply because it is available. Instead, I think it is enough to say that the actual world is fully determinate and concrete and particular in a way that no abstraction can be in principle. Whatever is required for concrete existence is something that the abstract lacks as the abstract is nowhere and timeless. Isn't it interesting, then, with this in mind, that the modern state of physics tells us that that space and time are not fundamental, and appear nowhere in the most foundational equations. Perhaps this is because this is exactly what the abstract lacks such that they fail to become actual.